So, about that re-distillation prevention on PDFs…

I got a PDF of my transcript from a university I used to attend. I won’t say which, but it’s in Salisbury and not very imaginatively named. The transcript had a variety of password-protection baloney on it, which I didn’t want.

Stripping the password is easy if you know it, because you can open the PDF in acrobat reader, select “print”, “print to file” and print to a postscript file (with a .ps extension). That removes the password protection, giving you a clear postscript file, which, in theory, you can distill back to PDF.

Unfortunately, the postscript file is marked as unredistillable (if that’s even a word). There is a fix for this, though: the exact opposite of what is described here.